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Knifehead isn’t the end of the world for just the Beckets.
Bruce, is, initially, the only one who feels guilty. The reason being that Trevin hasn’t let the happenings of February 29th hit him yet. They spend the first night after the event, after Knifehead, staring at walls. They don’t eat. They don’t sleep. They don’t talk or move or think. Simply existing, for now, is the only thing keeping them sane.
Bruce falls first. Bruce falls the hardest.
(Bruce was always the empathetic one.)
The older of the two latches onto the younger and sobs into his chest; shoulders heaving, body wracked with tremors. Trevin comforts Bruce numbly. Trevin’s confused over the past few days. He doesn’t get why Bruce is crying. So, they had messed up, what was wrong? The Becket kid had taken care of the kaiju. They lost a pilot. They lose pilots all the time. Bruce didn’t act like this from secondhand- oh. Bruce didn’t let secondhand events effect him like this.
Was losing the other Becket kid their fault?
He lets the answer to that question sink in.
_____________
Bruce picks up old habits that Trevin thought he had ditched and left in the mud. Smoking, primarily. Trevin becomes quieter. Their ghost drift exchanges and enhances their shared guilt. Eventually, that turns into clinical depression, and then insomnia (mostly for Trevin).
(more pills find themselves in the Gage’s daily regimen of Metharocin)
(Bruce takes more than he should)
The twins spend nights in their rooms most of the time, sharing a too-small bed and curling together as a whole. Bruce sleeps and snores; Trevin lies awake more often than not and lets his hatred for the cigarette smoke smell that Bruce carries around with him simmer. He never says anything, though, and settles for running his fingers through Bruce’s hair, hot saltwater briming on his eyelashes.
Training takes their minds off of things for small amounts of time, and helps calm the thrumming anxiety in Bruce’s veins. He smokes only for the calming ability the nicotine has, as he doesn’t care for the taste at all. The first few drags aren’t bad, but at the midpoint of the cigarette, he gives up on it and just releases the smoke out of his nostrils instead of his mouth. He gets shit for it, but it doesn’t stop him.
(Bruce is still taking more pills than he should)
____________
During a regular check-up and screening, Bruce was diagnosed with a heart condition and radiation poisoning. Trevin’s expression blanks, hollows, realizes, denies, and settles into disbelief. The rest of the day is spent in each other’s company more than ever. That night, Trevin asks for a lullaby, and Bruce obliges. The older twin’s singing voice was never anything beautiful, and the smog from his cigarettes hasn’t helped any, but he howls, brokenly, an old favorite of their mother’s anyway.
He’d never let his brother go to sleep without a lullaby if he wanted one.
It’s getting late and I
Cannot seem to find my way home
tonight
Feels like I am falling down a rabbit hole
falling for forever
wonderfully wandering alone…
(Later he resolves to put the cigarettes and his lighter high on a shelf. Trevin brightens.)
_____________
One night, the guilt of February 29th creeps up on Bruce (because he forgot to take his depression pills for the third day in a row), and it dredges up memories of an empty casket and an absent Raleigh Becket.
The only Becket present that day was the headstone.
Trevin finds him with a half empty bottle of gin in his hand, what little sleeping pills he left strewn across the floor, an apology note taped to the dresser. He wastes no time calling medical and getting Bruce’s stomach pumped.
When Bruce is allowed to walk freely again, he searches for Trevin, and holds him close when hits are placed on his chest. He knows it was selfish, and he is never going to let it happen again.
Jaeger pilots die together.
What would my head be like
If not for my shoulders
Or without your smile
May it follow you forever
May it never leave you
To sleep in the stone,
May we stay lost on our way home
_____________
Jaeger pilots die together. That’s the unspoken truth for them; that if they die in combat, which they almost certainly will, it will be together. It seems wrong for it to be any other way. Trevin muses on this while running his hands through Bruce’s hair one night when he’s sleeping, and lets the tears fall, hot and huge, when clumps of his twin’s hair fall through his fingers. He wonders if, this time around, two certain pilots will die separated.
Hours before, Bruce was alone and thinking (which is never a good thing for the possibly terminal). Mainly about his illness. The poisoning felt strange, if he was being honest. Long bouts of tiredness and a heaviness in his chest that he can only describe as disease. Strangely enough, he doesn’t want to feel better. Feels like it’s some kind of penance. Hell, maybe it is; maybe it’s to make up for all the shit he’s put Trevin through. That would explain why he doesn’t give two shits about being cured. Suffering himself to make up for being a terrible brother feels...well...just about right.
Now that’s a thought.
He’ll sleep on it.
C’mon, c’mon, with everything falling down around me
I’d like to believe in all the possibilities
If I should die tonight
May I first just say I’m sorry
For I, never felt like anybody
I am a man of many hats although I
Never mastered anything
When I am ten feet tall
I’ve never felt much smaller, since the fall
Nobody seems to know my name
So don’t leave me to sleep all alone
May we stay lost on our way home?
______________
Three days. Three fucking days, and they were supposed to be out of here. Trevin is furious. Bruce is resigned. Anger, however, isn’t going to kill the kaiju on Washington State’s doorstep. Even if the kaiju’s anger is going to kill them. Suiting up once again, braving the danger of being killed or getting cancer once again, the step into their conn-pod, and initiate the drift.
It’s always been a nice, quiet thing for them, up until now. Up until Trevin sees Bruce’s memory, breathes Bruce’s thoughts and soaks up his feelings of that quiet revelation. They don’t go out of sync, but Trevin does look at Bruce like he’s cut out his heart.
(which he might have, to be honest)
They don’t catch the beast’s name, but they do catch it’s claws in the conn-pod. Bruce is too harried with the kaiju, curse the thing, to notice Trevin. Somehow, he doesn’t. fucking. notice. Trevin. But they thrust Romeo Blue’s chest fin into the kaiju’s fucking skull, and smash a fist into it’s trachea. It falls, dead now, finally, but Bruce’s vision is swimming and Romeo is going down. Sinking into the deep.
Pain. Suddenly, pain. A lot of it, in the center of his chest. It’s not disease this time, he knows. And he looks over at Trevin. Trevin, who he loves and would never lose if he could help it. Trevin, who he shared a womb with. Trevin, who he took exams for in high school and fought with and for. Trevin, who is the only reason he’s alive.
Trevin, who has a spear of shrapnel sticking out of his abdomen. Both ways.
Romeo thuds with it’s arms outstretched, grasping at the ocean ground, head tipped forward and salt water leaking through the gaping hole in the conn-pod. Bruce disconnects from his cradle and falls to the floor, pain unbearable. Gasping through it, and the water, he scrambles his way to his twin, and hits the button that cuts Trevin from his own harness.
He’s bleeding out, Bruce knows, and holds him in his arms. “Trevin,” He pleads, hunched over his dying brother, the one he wanted to protect, “Trevin, please. Stay with me, stay with me buddy.” The tears come now, mingling with the salt water pooling around him. They’re hot and ugly, just like the nights after knifehead. A shaking hand raises, and falls, and twitches. Bruce rushes to grab that hand, squeezing it as if it would help.
There’s no possible way Trevin could speak right now, convulsing and blood dribbling out of his mouth, but he smiles through it. It breaks Bruce just a little more. The pain is nearly whiting out Bruce’s vision, but he keeps his eyes focused on Trevin, for all those damn moments when he didn’t.
A crack and spark whispers in Bruce’s ears. The ghost drift coursing through them that he'd be cursing any other time, but not now. Trevin’s in the corners of his mind that he can’t inhabit, a soothing fixed point. He’s speaking, but it’s cracked and frayed around the edges. Bruce strains his ears, and listens. “Hey Bruce.” There! There it is. “Hey Trevin.” Bruce echoes. Even the voice in the drift is shaking, “So I figure since this is it-” His twin begins, and Bruce panics. There’s a mantra of “nonononononononononono” ricocheting around both their brains. Trevin quiets it quickly. “I know. I don’t want it to end either.” Bruce chokes on a sob. “You can...you can leave through an escape pod right now, if you’re quick. I’d like it if you stayed here though.” Bruce shakes his head, vision blurring further and face screwing up. “I’m staying here. I’d never leave you alone.” There’s soft laughter on the edges of Bruce’s mind. “I know. I know. I know, and I love you.” The knot in Bruce’s throat is getting bigger and Trevin’s blood is mingling with the water. “And since this is it,” He whispers through the drift, voice so soft and so unlike Trevin it hurts, “I was wondering if you could. Could sing me to sleep?” And he nods. “Mom’s old favorite?” he asks, laying his head down so his ear is over Trevin’s slowing heart. “Yeah. That’d be nice.”
_________
Bruce’s singing voice was never the best, and the cigarette smoke never helped. His voice was always a little bit too scratchy and off key. Here, though, at the end of their world, it’s just right.
He’d never let his brother go to sleep without a lullaby if he wanted one. And, after all, Jaeger pilots die together.
(Faintly, as the water is flooding Bruce’s senses, he hears a soft “G’night, Brucey.”)
(Maybe it’s just the lack of oxygen.)
C’mon, c’mon, with everything falling down around me
I’d like to believe in all the possibilities
C’mon, c’mon, with everything falling down around me
I’d like to believe in all the possibilities
Try not to mistake what you have with what you hate
It could leave, it could leave, come the morning
Celebrate the night
It’s the fall before the climb
Shall we sing, shall we sing, 'til the morning
If I fall forward, you fall flat
And if the sun should lift me up
Would you come back? C'mon!
_
C’mon, c’mon, with everything falling down around me
I’d like to believe in all the possibilities
C’mon, c’mon, with everything falling down around me
I’d like to believe in all the possibilities
So c’mon, c’mon, with everything falling down around me
I’d like to believe in all the possibilities
It’s getting late and I, cannot seem to find my way home tonight.